What Jumps Out: Damp Squib

Colombia continues to stumble forward, struggling to stay on the rails, another week, thus far, in terms of progress towards a bright new world.

The CUT‘s general strike over the past two days was, most importantly, peaceful, and also extremely modest in scale. If the goal was to create a groundswell of support for the Labor Reform Referendum, a failure. Ordinarily, I am suspicious of the mainstream media’s reporting of pro-Petro events, but on this occasion, either the workers didn’t stay away or used the two days of good weather for some R&R.

Back in the senate, labor reform 2.0 has edged forward at the commission level with the adjustments in the articles being criticized by workers and employers alike – it remains what it will look like, or even how far it will advance.

The Banco de la República – Colombia, which has taken the month off in terms of overnight rate decisions, reported another 18% increase in remittances, this time for April, to $1 billion USD – YTD; they are now up 15%, $4.2 billion USD. It remains to see the impact of Trumponomics, but these transfers, which used to be negligible next to other countries in the region, have certainly grown in importance.

Fedesarrollo for April reported an increase in retail confidence to 24.9% (15-month high), a reflection of Colombians’ propensity to shop, whilst industrial confidence dropped slightly, both in line with recent real sector data from Departamento Administrativo Nacional de Estadística – DANE Colombia.

According to the TMF of 79 countries surveyed (accounting for 94% of global GDP), Colombia is the 5th hardest country to do business in – but before the conservative elite start pointing at Gustavo Petro, it is where the country was in 2022 & 2023, and there are various European countries even lower down.

Final oil data for 2024 revealed an average daily production of 772k boepd (modestly down) whilst oil reserves rose to 7.2 years whilst gas reserves dropped by 13% – no surprises. Ecopetrol has announced that despite Shell‘s departure, they will push ahead with their ambitious offshore gas development.

Separately, CEO Ricardo Roa is again under pressure to quit after another scandal hit both him and the company. Despite its privatization almost 20 years ago, it seems that the oil giant has been embroiled in such headlines since the day I arrived.

Enough for a Friday.

My regards.

Roops.

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The CUT’s general strike was peaceful. Photo credit: CUT Colombia/Facebook.